A Brush With Death (3 page)

“Why should he be suspicious?"

“Don't they teach Shakespeare at that college? ‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.’ He took a pretty good look at us.” John butted the cig in the ashtray by the elevator door and we went downstairs.

“I thought he was nice,” I said.

“That wouldn't be because he thought you were
belle
, would it? Crooks are often nice—friendly, I mean."

“His views on Christmas too—he didn't sound like a money-mad sort of person."

“He gypped the company out of a hundred grand,” John said firmly, and we went to wait in the car.

In about ten minutes, Latour drove out of the parking garage in the back. He was wearing a felt cap and driving a very nifty little new Jag. Not many of my professors could afford wheels like that. We followed him to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. When he parked and went inside, we figured he'd told the truth about that anyway and hustled back to his apartment.

“How are you going to get in?” I asked.

“If I can't jimmy the lock, I'll use this.” He flashed a Royal Canadian Mounted Police badge at me. I imagine there was also an FBI and Scotland Yard and other police badges in the wallet as well.

“The janitor'll tell him he was searched,” I warned.

“We'll cross that bridge if we come to it."

We didn't come to it. When we got back to Côte des Neige, we got into the building by the same ruse as before, and John jimmied the apartment door with a piece of hardware called a spider. The apartment looked innocent, with the sort of stuff you'd expect in a well-heeled bachelor's pad. There was a brown leather sofa, a wall of stereo equipment, and a lot of books. The original abstract expressionist painting on the wall wasn't bad, but it didn't give any impression it had been done by a genius. The minute we were in the door, I could smell the paints and turpentine. John followed his nose to the studio. It was a two-bedroom apartment, with one room turned into a studio.

I followed him and looked around the room. It had the usual stuff, an easel, tables with supplies and pots of brushes standing in turpentine, a linoleum over the carpet to protect it. There were paintings standing against the walls of the room. They were in the same style as the one in the living room. The backgrounds were white, with angry slashes of color laid on with a wide brush. Some of them were red and black and yellow, a few had blue and green. All were signed Tower. I cocked an eyebrow at John. “Van Gogh it ain't."

'Window dressing,” he said curtly, and pointed to the easel. Beside it there was a table with a slide projector and a metal measuring tape. On the far wall, there was a screen to receive the image. Sean flicked the switch and a picture appeared on the screen. It was a Van Gogh of a seated woman in a white dress with brownish hair. At least it looked like a Van Gogh, one I had never seen before. In daylight, the colors were washed out, but it certainly had the unique tortured brushstroke of Van Gogh.

“Mademoiselle Gachet,” John said. “The original's in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She was his doctor's daughter, and the love of Vincent's life. Latour's forging all right. The goods have got to be here somewhere."

We began lifting the top row of abstracts lining the walls to peer beneath. He lifted out a portrait of a young redheaded woman, and another of a grizzled old man. “This is more like it!” John exclaimed.

We examined them, and it was true they showed more talent than the angry slashes of color. I mean you could tell the artist really could paint, but these two bore no resemblance to Van Gogh. The woman wasn't a real beauty, but Latour had made her look like a Pre-Raphaelite madonna, with a pale face and streaming hair.

“Keep looking,” John said. “I'm going to scan his bedroom. People always hide valuable stuff in their bedrooms."

I discovered what I thought might be an effort at forging a Kreighoff, an old Canadian painter who was beginning to sell for interesting dollars. It was a winter scene of a horse-pulled sleigh cutting through the snow. I went to tell John, and found him on his knees.

“Say one for me while you're down there,” I called from the doorway.

He looked over his shoulder, and I knew by the wicked gleam in his eyes that he had found the mother lode. I hurried forward and watched as he turned over the paintings, one by one. They were done on stretched canvas, unframed. The canvas wasn't white around the edges, but well weathered, to pose as nineteenth century. It was almost impossible to believe that what we were looking at was not the work of Vincent Van Gogh. The peculiar, twisted brushstrokes were there, the vibrant colors, even the subject matter: a sailing boat, a green room with a yellow chair, an old man with a pipe, the woman we had just seen on the screen. John kept turning. On the bottom, there were some in Van Gogh's earlier dark and austere style, like the famous
Potato Eaters,
done before he fell in with the Impressionists in Paris. There were three in that style. John pulled out his Bic-Pic and started snapping pictures.

“They look brand new. They wouldn't fool anyone,” I pointed out.

“They would by the time he's finished with them."

We had been there quite a while, and I was becoming nervous. “Looks like it's time to call the Arts and Fraud Squad,” I reminded him.

“Maybe,” John said, and continued shifting the pictures and snapping them.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe'? You've got him red-handed."

His eyes glittered like diamonds. I had never seen him so excited. “It isn't forgery till he tries to sell them as originals. We're dealing with more than a minor league forger here, Cass. I think we've stumbled into something big."

“He seems to be going into retail forgery. Let's get out, John. He might be back soon."

“Right. Take a look around and make sure we didn't leave any clues. I just want to have a quick rifle through his desk."

John arranged the paintings carefully and returned them to their resting place under Latour's bed. I quickly rearranged the paintings in the studio and checked the apartment while John went through the desk in the bedroom. In about three minutes he came out, still glowing with success. He looked as if he'd just won the state lottery.

“Let's get out while the getting's good,” he murmured.

We checked the peephole in the door for traffic in the hall. It was empty, and we left. I swear John was trembling with excitement. His hands were shaking when he started the car. He didn't think to ask me where I lived or anything. He just headed back to the Bonaventure. I didn't want to risk an accident, so I didn't pester him with questions, but I was nearly bursting with curiosity.

“Want some coffee?” John asked, when we went into the hotel lobby. “It's colder than a witch's ti—ticker in here. Ticker—that's heart! Witches have cold hearts."

“To say nothing of tits. I'd love some coffee, thanks."

He looked sheepish. “We'll take it upstairs. We can't talk in public."

“How exciting! I'm being invited up to a bachelor's hotel room—to talk."

“Sex fiend!” he charged approvingly. “Cream and sugar?"

“Cream, no sugar.” No point trying to diet a few days before Christmas. “Make that double cream."

But he was too impatient to go to the coffee shop. “What the hell, we'll have room service bring it up. After a break like this..."

The excitement was still there. We rushed up the elevator and along the hushed halls to John's room. I don't suppose the Bonaventure has a bad room, but this one was something special. The hotel rooms I've stayed in are indistinguishable in my mind. The general type consists of a room about ten feet by twelve with a very noisy air conditioner in the corner creating an unpleasant draft. It is painted off-white with pictures from Woolworth's on the walls—maybe something by the starving artists, tops. The bedspread is flowered, to hide spots I suspect. and weighs about a hundred pounds.

John's rooms—a suite, which gave delightful intimations of future pampering—were much larger, quieter, and classier.

The draperies and bedspread were a symphony of unspotted, dull gold fabric. If there was an air conditioner in the suite, it performed discreetly. We went to the little sitting room, which had a fridge and small table and sink as well as a sofa; I threw my books on the table and wiggled out of my coat while John ordered coffee.

“All right, tell me! I'm bursting with curiosity,” I said, when he came back.

He was too restless to sit down. He paced the room, showing off his nice broad shoulders and lean torso, which looked very good in that Savile Row suit. “Like I said,” he began, with his customary disregard for the fine points of grammar, “I've been swatting up on Van Gogh. I have to verify it, but if all those pictures Latour was forging aren't from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I'm a wallaby's uncle."

I blinked, and latched on to a totally irrelevant point. “Have you been to Australia lately, John?"

He scratched his neck and gave me a rancid look. “How did you know Penderson got the Ashton case in Sydney?"

“I didn't."

It was unsettling that I had to ask my fiancé such questions as had he been to Australia. His unhappy answer bothered me not a whit. That rancor was for Penderson, not me. But we would have our argument later. I thought about the Van Goghs all being from the same museum, and soon connected it to earlier worries about insurance. “Good lord! Do you mean Latour plans to knock off a whole museum!"

“I don't know what he's up to, but it's something big.” I saw that what I had taken for simple excitement contained a large part of frustration as well.

“I see what you mean. He wouldn't be forging copies if he meant to steal just the originals. What he must have in mind is substituting the fakes. That seems like a roundabout way to steal a billion or so dollars."

“A billion? Make that about five billion."

“If he could get into the museum undetected when no one's there, why be so obliging as to substitute fakes for what he steals?"

“It beats me. Unless he plans to knock off more than one museum, and doesn't want the first one to be detected."

I swallowed. “Wow! When you said big, you weren't kidding."

“It's humungous. A hell of a lot bigger deal than Latour was ever involved in before. He certainly isn't in this alone. Nobody would think that big, to knock off the entire collected works of a famous painter like Van Gogh. No, it's just the Amsterdam collection he's after. And even for that, he'd need inside help. There's got to be a guy connected with the museum in on this one."

“You said there were two hundred plus pictures there. Latour only had about ten, didn't he?"

“Exactly ten. And not actually the ten best either. I mean any old Van Gogh is worth a mint nowadays. Michelangelo's grocery list went for fifty thou a few years ago, and Vincent's laundry list would be worth something. But if Latour's forging, why not forge the most valuable paintings? He copied some of the smaller, less valuable ones, some not from Vincent's most favored period, toward the end of his career."

“Maybe he just painted the ones that were easier to forge, and plans to sell them."

John shook his head. “No, if he meant to pretend they were newly discovered Van Goghs, he would have done imitations, not dead ringers. You know, pictures in Van Gogh's style, with his sort of subject matter, but nothing Van Gogh had done before. He would have done a slightly different version of
Starry Night,
for instance. Van Gogh often did series, like the
Sunflowers,
the
Cypresses,
and the various
Chair
paintings. That's what Latour did before, in Europe. This time he wanted the copies to be so perfect that he had slides of the originals projected while he worked. He had a tape measure, to make sure he got the dimensions perfect, and he did them on old canvases. They were forgeries, not imitations."

“So he plans to pass them off as originals,” I concluded.

The coffee came, and John signed for it. “I've got to call a guy about a
joual,"
he muttered.

“The Van Gogh Museum?"

“That too, but first I'd better put a tail on Latour. I'd feel like a jackass if he split on me. You pour yourself some java. I won't be a minute."

I listened from the sitting room and heard John rifle through the phone book. “Is this the Discreet Detective Agency?” he asked. Apparently it was, because he asked to have a man sent to his hotel room immediately. After a minute, he lifted the receiver again and asked for long distance. He was calling the Netherlands. While he talked, I luxuriated in the splendor of the sitting room, enjoying the coffee and looking forward to the arrival of a private eye from the Discreet Detective Agency. This was how life should be—a mixture of luxury and intrigue and romance. And it was how it would be, as soon as I graduated and married John.

In that ideal world, I wouldn't have an exam the next afternoon. Fortunately I was up on my Existentialists. Existentialism had seemed a sophisticated philosophy to me in my younger days, so l had read about it. I had a nodding acquaintance with Sartre through Simone de Beauvoir before starting my formal studies. I'd already read Camus's
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
twice, and knew that he claimed in vain to disassociate himself from the Existentialists. If only my professor didn't include a compulsory question on the dialectical materialism controversy, I was home safe. I tended to get bogged down there. Who doesn't?

When John came back, he had taken off his jacket. I silently admired his expensive shirt, and enjoyed a mental picture of the chest (hirsute but not apish) beneath it. I was feeling amorous, and thought we might enjoy some romance before the detective arrived. I knew the gleam in John's eyes had a different origin and asked politely, “Did you learn anything from Amsterdam?"

Instead of answering, he put his head back and laughed like a hyena. “We've got it! The Amsterdam connection."

I felt a surge of adrenaline that had nothing to do with John's physique. “Somebody from the museum? Who?"

“An assistant curator named Jan Bergma."

“Do you know him?"